We are living in the Good Old Days of tomorrow

A (somewhat) unoriginal take on how to stay (somewhat) sane – [Estimated reading time: 30 min.]

Not AI - I have the basic decency to fake my own images!

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THIS IS JUST THE VERY BEGINNING.

If the entrance sign to our garden would have one of those letter boards that so many US-American churches adorn their front yard with, this phrase would be this year’s resolution. The beginning of a new, chaotic climate regimen, following a multi-millennia period of unusual stability. An era of scarcity, following an age of abundance. It is the beginning of something new, something that we can’t really put our finger on yet. Nobody knows exactly how it’s going to play out, although we can make educated guesses at a few basic dynamics.

At the same time, the current decade marks a definite end of an era. We all feel it, one way or another: we are living in the End Times. Not the literal “end of the world,” obviously, at least not yet – but the decline and collapse of the only global civilization that ever existed (and will ever exist). A profound calamity unfolding on a truly epic scale, in real-time, all around us. It is a mythological process, and just as millenarian cults emerged around the time when earlier civilizations entered their phase of terminal decline, we now have “corporate sustainability leaders,” longtermists and Michael Mann telling us everything is going to be okay if we just do more of the same things we’ve done so far: extract, produce, consume, innovate, progress, grow the economy.

Life has gotten harder over the past few years, ever since the Covid pandemic showed beyond doubt that the seemingly unstoppable juggernaut of industrial civilization stumbles and falters fast when confronted with anything other than “business as usual.” Perhaps surprisingly, the past few years have also shown that earlier “doomsayers” were right – after all, in the story of The Boy Who Cried Wolf,¹ the Wolf does show up eventually. It’s just that nobody in the village believes the Boy by then. A cautionary tale for our times.
The 1972 study Limits to Growth, for instance, could not possibly have foreseen the outbreak of a pandemic, yet the models that most closely match empirical observations show a peaking and/or decline for most variables somewhen around the early 2020s. Whatever the reasons for the start of this predicted overall decline ultimately were, the important point is that it happened anyway. A dent in economic growth, industrial output, and even in greenhouse gas emissions. After the financial crisis of 2008 was simply papered over with an ever-increasing amount of debt, the first serious hit, “first blood,” so to speak, was the pandemic – the first obvious sign of this civilization’s vulnerability. Many more are to come, although most people try hard to believe that this was a one-time slip-up, and after swaying unsteadily for a few years (they tell themselves) society has now regained balance.

But new problems continue to amass unabated, and the abysmally small euphoria the system was able to muster over the (alleged) “end of the pandemic” quickly turned sour, as other problems (often ripple effects of the pandemic itself) took its place. Since then, many more people have joined the growing chorus around the Boy, chanting “Wolf, Wolf, Wolf!” louder and louder, so the remaining villagers have to turn up the volume of their mobile devices to drown out the annoying chatter – and the growling of the beast at the village’s edge. The point of diminishing returns, described by Joseph Tainter in “The Collapse of Complex Societies,” is coming to a head. Regarding industrial output, resource extraction and (most concerningly) agriculture, it seems we have already passed it – all things (including EROI) considered.
The more harvests decline, the more people spray and fertilize, unaware that the very acts of spraying and fertilizing are one of the main factors diminishing harvests in the long term. No amount of chlorpyrifos, glyphosate, superphosphate and ammonium nitrate can make up for a living soil and a biosphere bustling with life.

The latest Graph of Doom: each day for the past 1¼ years, global sea surface temperatures have set new records. Once the red line dips below the yellow line, this will be interpreted as “good news” by many people. A pretty low bar, all things considered.

While concerned scientists come up with ever more creative & dramatic ways of visualizing just how fucked we are, life continues. For the moment, the illusion still holds up. People can drive to work, get a nice meal and a coffee during lunchbreak, and drive home after work to consume more food and entertainment. We can order stuff from the other side of the planet, take out a loan, get a new job, go shopping, or scroll the Feed.² Another sweet hit of dopamine is only one click away.
Not that all this is desirable per se, but it’s what we’re used to, so it gives us a sense of stability – and hence security. Exactly what people crave in these uncertain times.
Of course things are far from perfect, but they will nonetheless soon seem so – in hindsight. The very concept of “the Good Ol’ Days” necessitates a good deal of romanticizing.

At the same time, I think we can all agree that life has gotten more difficult. More stressful. Life seems to have accelerated, and more and more people find that they have less and less time for doing the things they actually care about. As the cultural juggernaut bumped into the first biophysical limits, showing clearly that it had finally run out of new places to exploit, it responded by turning onto its own people. We all feel “the Squeeze,” as the only way to maintain GDP growth left to the system is to push people (and corporations, banks and entire countries) ever deeper into debt. Every financial transaction contributes to GDP, no matter if it’s a debt repayment, an insurance claim, or an arms deal.
If we’re being completely honest: life, perhaps for all but the most privileged, is becoming increasingly unbearable. The sheer weight of what is happening, what will happen soon, and the cognitive dissonance resulting from nobody doing anything about it, is poisoning our spirit. At the same time, the modern world is – quite literally – poisoning us as well: for humans and non-humans alike, every breath, every sip, and every bite these days contains toxins. 

One thing that has changed since the pandemic is that I am much less confident with predicting the future – at least in the near term. Back in the early 2010s, when I first acutely became collapse-aware as a teenager, the bumpy ride down the slope seemed far off in the future. After a few years of further study, I started expecting to see the first unmistakable signs of collapse in the early 2020s, and although I would have never guessed that it would be a virus that marks the first obvious sign of a turning point (at least for most of people), my gut feeling turned out valid.

To be fair, that doesn’t make me some sort of visionary. Anyone with a relatively keen awareness of what’s happening in the world would have arrived at the same conclusion, and many (much smarter people) did, some of them even decades earlier. And with everything I’ve come to know about the many interconnected crises that we face today, the most surprising thing, perhaps, is that the system even made it this far.

My point is, I always had at least a vague sense of what was coming in the next few years. This finally changed last year – mostly due to the off-the-charts temperatures, especially in the world’s oceans. I increasingly had the eerie feeling that something was about to happen, something big. Now, I should perhaps clarify that I am by no means suggesting that the collapse of civilization will be a singular event – it’s more likely a long and laborious process – but for the people for whom climate change (both a symptom and a cause of collapse) turns reality, it often very much feels like it. Ask the residents of any of the towns that were burned to the ground during record-breaking wildfires in Canada, Brazil, the US, Greece and Australia, or people in Libya, Pakistan or China who’ve lost everything to floods. Or ask any of the local Thai farmers whose orchards dried up in this year’s heatwave.
From a global perspective it might be a rather gradual decline, although the road will become a lot steeper (and more bumpy) as we accelerate towards rock bottom. For individuals, on the other hand, it will more and more often come as an event, or a series of events – when they lost their job, when the well dried up, when their home disappeared into the raging waters, when the rains didn’t come and the crops died, when the armed men showed up.

No, what I mean by “I can’t predict the future anymore” is that I have the uncanny feeling that collapse will soon become an indisputable reality for the general population here in Thailand. The point at which it becomes undeniable that we’re witnessing the last death throes of the fossil fuel behemoth, the Dopamine Machine. For each of the past years I could say with relative confidence that the current year is probably not the one in which “society collapses” (by any meaningful definition of the term) – but right now, I’m not so sure anymore. Each of the following few years might be the one. Year Zero, if we’re being dramatic. Every day I expect to see breaking news of a major economic crash, yet another military coup, or some other calamity that pushes the already strained system over the edge and into disarray.
Things look dire all throughout Southeast Asia, with leaders region-wide obsessed with squeezing a few more years of growth out of a dying world. The level of cognitive dissonance is staggering. While entire fruit orchards dry up and farmers lose everything, the Thai Prime Minister touts plans of building the world’s highest skyscraper in Bangkok. As local energy giant PTT hastily purchased a shipment of LNG to avoid blackouts during the relentless heatwave that scorched the continent for the entire month of April, the Prime Minister lobbies the Formula 1 to hold a race in the middle of the capital. Diesel prices are at a record high (and perhaps won’t ever go down again) and prices of the most basic necessities are increasing steadily, yet leaders continue to encourage blind optimism in the face of utter ruin.
But, as the saying goes, “pride comes before a fall.”

I can’t shake the feeling that something is about to happen, at least regionally. I (carefully) hope that this will be the event that finally galvanizes enough people and thus makes society at large aware of our shared predicament. Moreover, I hope the next few years will shatter the illusion of the continuance of a lifestyle characterized by consumption and pollution. But I don’t have high hopes, considering what I’ve witnessed so far. This year’s exceptional drought wasn’t enough to start a broader conversation about adapting agriculture to a rapidly changing climate (apart from the usual gibberish³). It will take more than that. Maybe the economic crisis that has been looming over the country finally materializes in full force? Or maybe the long-awaited collapse of the Chinese economy will send shockwaves over the continent and around the world. Who knows? Oh, and nuclear war is also still on the 2024 collapse bingo card.

But what, when and why? My guess is as good as yours.

A recent piece in the exquisite Substack blog The Honest Sorcerer (in which the author suggests that 2025 will be a tipping point, mostly due to the expected Net Peak Oil), helped me to connect the dots concerning my sudden loss of (clear) vision. B quotes the Recalibration23 follow-up study to the famous 1972 Limits to Growth report, whose authors write:

“However, it is important to note that the connections in the model and the recalibration are only valid for the rising edge, as many of the variables and equations represented in the model are not physical but socio-economic. It is to be expected that the complex socio-economic relationships will be rearranged and reconnected in the event of a collapse. World3 holds the relationships between variables constant. Therefore it is not useful to draw further conclusions from the trajectory after the tipping points. Rather, it is important to recognize that there are large uncertainties about the trajectory from then on, building models for this could be a whole new field of research.” [Emphasis added]

We have just passed Peak Everything, and we’re past the ridge. Society is like the cartoon character that runs over a cliff but, not having yet recognized it, takes a few more quick steps in the air before looking down, letting out a scream, and finally falling into the abyss. To be more exact: we are now at the point where larger numbers of people are looking down and realize that there is no more ground under our feet. Some of us have started screaming. And ever more people suddenly find themselves in free fall.

The reason why I have absolutely no fucking clue how the world will look like by the end of the year (apart from the gradual worsening of every major problem, of course), is because we’ve so far been on the easily predictable upwards curves of the above graph (which, environmental/political/social conditions permitted, is a steep and steady ascend). The downslope is going to be a whole lot more chaotic, riddled with tipping points and positive feedback loops, and since complex systems are reactive to changes to themselves and thus virtually impossible to model, I am out of clever ideas. From here on we go blind. We’ve entered uncharted territory, and can’t rely entirely (or even in a large part) on past wisdom to guide us through the currently unfolding metacrisis. As I relentlessly point out, we can learn a whole lot about alternative subsistence modes and social organizations from hunter-gatherers, but we now inhabit a world that’s a lot more crowded, a lot less abundant and a lot more toxic than ever before. There are no easy answers, no ready-made one-size-fits-all solutions.

Every now and then, I am beset with uncanny visions about how dystopian the world already is. Due to Shifting Baseline Syndrome, things deteriorate slowly enough that most people don’t even take notice. But when friends & family from Germany tell me what’s considered “normal” these days, I can’t help but think that this is a society in free fall.⁴
Ordering certain equipment or replacement parts can easily get you onto month-long waiting lists: early contractions announcing the coming supply chain crunch. Massive highway bridges are nearing the end of their life, there is no money to replace them, so traffic is limited to one lane and the remaining vehicles are redirected over tiny rural roads, which soon enough start crumbling under the steady flow of heavy semi-trucks, after which the authorities simply erect a new sign designating said road to be a “30 km/h zone.” The much-famed German railway system is no real alternative anymore, since recurrent strikes, extreme weather and corporate greed regularly lead to train cancellations and jumbled schedules. Imagine the ensuing chaos. The unthinkable has happened: in punctuality-obsessed Germany, nothing is on time anymore!
But whereas for me the contrast to lived reality a decade ago⁵ is stark, for the people there it happened very gradually, and each day the change from yesterday is imperceptible, like for the slowly boiling frogs in the popular metaphor.

Another clearly dystopian (and widely commented on) feature of contemporary society is mobile phone use. Smart phone addiction has reached epidemic levels, with increasing numbers of people spending the majority of their waking hours in front of screens. To us, this is most obvious on the few occasions when we spend time & interact with “normal” people. My partner and I both use the same phone, which puts a useful upper limit on how much time each of us can spend with it. But how naturally people carry their phones in one hand at virtually all times, constantly record videos of themselves, and spend hours each day hunched over, eyes wide open & glued to the screen, never ceases to amaze us. You sometimes see schoolchildren at the bus stop sitting in a row, each bent over their own flickering screen, all phones blaring away at full volume.
For us garden hermits who don’t spend much time within society at large, this is truly terrifying, but I realize that many readers will see similar scenes every day. So often that it has become the new normal. But compare it with twenty (or even ten) years ago, and the stark contrast becomes obvious.

And yet, for the moment, things aren’t all that bad. (At least that’s very likely the case for you reading these words.)

A few short years from now, we will look back at this time as The Good Old Days, when there was still food in the stores, (relatively) affordable electricity, and we had all the conveniences we wanted (and then some). When we could still go on holiday, even if only for a few days. When there was a near infinite amount of entertainment just a few quick swipes and taps away. When we could just order food or eat out if we didn’t have enough time to prepare a meal. When we could pick a topic of our choice and find at least half a dozen documentaries about it online. When we could still go to the doctor for a quick health check. When we could videocall relatives and friends on the other side of the globe. A time when we still had the entire world at our disposal – at least digitally.
And a time in which we didn’t know hunger yet.

I could continue this list for quite a while, but I think you get what I mean. I few years down the road, we’ll look back at the “troubled twenties,” with all their trials and tribulations, as a time in which things still functioned, at least to any meaningful extent. The shutdowns and quarantines during the pandemic will seem like summer camp compared to what the next few decades hold, and most of us will long for the “stability” of the time when things were still in order.

Actually, considering what’s yet to come, things really are not all that terrible right now. And this will be as true tomorrow as it is today. Right now I’m fine – fed, dry, safe, and content.

This realization has caused a marked shift in my perception. I readily admit that this is not an original thought at all (and I’ve heard a great many people from all sorts of backgrounds say the exact same thing), but I’ve reached the point at which I’ve come to know this not only on a purely intellectual level, but in my heart.

Consequently, I find myself in a much less combative mood. With everything that’s going on, it just feels like a waste of time to argue about pointless things and minor disagreements. And this extends to debates: whereas I formerly enjoyed engaging in debates, both online and in the real world, these days it all seems so repetitive, and just like my mind is made up, so is everyone else’s – so what’s the point. Instead of bickering over bullshit, the focus should be on bridging gaps: building & maintaining relationships within our immediate community and our inner social circle. Soon, we might depend on them for our survival, despite their flaws.

What we need now is less information overload, less “news,” less nonsense – which of course also means less social media. I for myself have come to regard the Feed as increasingly dull, shallow, repetitive, and, quite frankly, mind-numbingly boring. Is it worth scrolling through five advertisements, three sponsored posts, a random AI-generated image, feel-good news that have been shared a hundred times already, a handful of selfies from random acquaintances, yet another purported “technological breakthrough that will change the world,” and a list of videos appealing to your base instincts, just to finally stumble upon one article that’s worth reading? I’d much rather spend that time watching raindrops fall or trees grow, or playing with our baby rabbits.

And how much that’s really worth reading is even to be found out there anymore? Even formerly informative outlets like The Great Simplification have become somewhat repetitive, and the same is probably true for the blog you’re currently reading. Perhaps there is just so many things that can be said about this Simplification, and at a certain point you just have to take all that knowledge and finally go do something about it, or at least about the aspect(s) that you care about. All that’s “new” is that things are getting worse.

The news on any given day are pretty much constantly the same, so it becomes somewhat pointless to follow them with any real enthusiasm or regularity. Here, I’ll give you an overview over the news headlines on any given day in the near future:

• A storm has devastated some tiny tropical island nation, and inhabitants are without food and running water.

• Atmospheric concentration of carbon dioxide now at record level, and climate change seems to be accelerating (but let’s wait another few years before making any definite statements).

• Drought and other extreme weather events are threatening harvests in another region.

• Infrastructure decays at alarming rates.

• Microplastics have been detected in [insert place name], in higher concentrations than expected.

• (Public/National/Household) debt reaches new record high.

• The war in Ukraine continues to drag on.

• Scientists have underestimated a crucial component of the climate system.

• “Tipping points not breached yet,” reassures expert.

• AI fails to live up to its promises.

• Innocent civilians are being killed in the Middle East.

• The road to Sustainable Development - How we can still reach the 2030 goals.

• An economic crisis looms.

• Stock markets roaring despite uncertainties.

• Two dozen more cute animal species threatened with extinction, with hundreds of less cute ones disappearing silently.

• Pesticide sales soar to record levels as plant disease threatens profits.

• Homelessness is on the rise as more people fall below the poverty line, even in overdeveloped countries.

• Democrats outraged at racist remarks by Trump.

• Peasants face famine in a small, impoverished sub-Saharan country.

• Manufacturing output continues to slump.

• The public health crisis is intensifying.

• Yields decline and food prices increase.

• Some politicians meet to talk about sustainability and shake hands.

• Drug abuse and depression continue to rise unabated.

You get the idea.

And since there is very little that me and you can do about this anyway, with “democracy,” “justice” and “freedom of speech” turning out to be a giant scam and whatnot, why even bother? The cat is out of the bag, the techno-industrial superorganism out of control, and the best thing we can do right now is to duck and hide as it throws its terminal tantrum.

I am inadvertently reminded of a memorable quote from the 1995 movie La Haine that captures our situation:

“Have you heard about the guy who fell off a skyscraper? On his way down past each floor, he kept saying to reassure himself: ‘So far, so good… So far, so good… So far, so good.’”

The main reason why the majority of the population hasn’t realized what’s happening, that we’re past the peak, treading air over the abyss, is because – so far – the system still functions. Not perfectly, mind you – not that it ever has – but it still manages to “get shit done” for the moment. Hospitals and schools are still open, infrastructure is being maintained and expanded, and although all this has gotten considerably more sluggish, pricey and difficult, the system marches on. For now. It’s stumbling, panting and sweating, tired from climbing a slope that seems to have gotten steeper and steeper.
But there’s food in the stores, movies in the theaters, gas at the pump, and the cities are bustling with (human) life. Wherever you go, there’s airplanes rushing overhead and the near-ubiquitous roaring of the roads in the background.

Musicians go on world tour, new iPhones get released, store shelves are stocked, and the mailman comes daily. Everything is under control, assure us politicians and leaders. “The future is still bright,” reaffirms an increasingly nervous circle of tech gurus. “We can still make it! Just let us tweak the Algorithm of our AI a bit, and it will finally be able to come up with solutions for all our problems!”
One is reminded of the inhabitants of Rapa Nui, who carved ever larger stone heads out of the rock as society crumbled around them (instead of implementing basic conservation & restoration strategies⁶ to counter environmental degradation).

We have to be honest about what awaits us, no matter how painful it is. If you’re concerned about the increasing inaffordability of chocolate and coffee, wait until this trend picks up for bread and rice. Food price surges are one of the most reliable indicators for imminent social upheaval and outright revolution. What happens then is anyone’s guess. But what is sure is that we will see suffering and depravity on a scale not seen in decades. Within our lifetime, we will see people starving with our own eyes – not just on TV – and all this will happen a lot sooner than we care to admit. We might die untimely and violent deaths ourselves. The odds are not in our favor. Even those in the Western Fortress will soon realize that those things are not refined to history books, that we have “solved” neither world hunger, nor poverty, nor eradicated disease.
What we did do is to kick plenty of cans down the road.

The destruction of the hills is slowly creeping up towards our garden, but the mountains stand firm.

In light of this slowly advancing avalanche of uncertainty, it seems like the best thing to do right now is to just try to enjoy life as good as anyhow possible, to savor the poetic aspects, to smell flowers and watch sunsets, while also continuing to witness collapse with both eyes open – and working towards whatever little glimmer of hope remains for us, our communities, and the ecosystem we’re embedded in.

This does not mean a descend into mindless hedonism, of course, which tends to be focused exclusively on dopamine (short-term pleasure), but instead a slowdown, a cop-out, a quiet exit from the rat race, and a consequent focus on what really matters, with serotonin (lasting contentment & true happiness) as its main driver. Instead of wanting ever more, we have to carefully consider how much is “just enough,” a value that by necessity needs to be lower than our current material standard of living.

Maybe the best way to get through this upheaval is to look at the realization that things are getting worse from a slightly different angle. Instead of focusing on the troublesome times ahead, one might as well savor the present day, since it’s quite likely the easiest life will be for the foreseeable future. Of course, this conclusion is (again) far from original – quite the contrary, it has long been somewhat of a cliché. Thousands of people are saying the same thing, and entire books have been written about it.

But when I consider that we’re living in the Good Ol’ Days of Tomorrow, it helps me enormously to see the things that still bear with us, among all the loss and devastation. I’m happy about every butterfly that flutters through the undergrowth, for each bee that continues pollinating flowers despite the oppressive heat, for every lonely firefly painting the night sky and each wild elephant that vainly longs for former times of plenty. I delight in the bird song that still fills our garden even during the hottest hours of the day, and the hornbills who unfailingly, almost stubbornly, continue their daily rounds to the feeding grounds on the other side of the valley and back.

I’ve also noticed that food tastes (even) better since I’ve had this realization.⁷ Every time I eat a special meal, something we don’t eat every day, I savor its taste more than ever before, because I’m aware that there is a limited number of times I will be able to enjoy this dish. We can’t grow kidney beans, for instance, but every now and then I love making one of my signature dishes: a strange, multicultural mutant of chilli con carne, Indian masala and Southern Thai gaeng ga-ti, a spicy curry with coconut milk and lavish amounts of homemade red berry vinegar. The price of one half-kilo bag of dried kidney beans has climbed from 30 Baht to 40 Baht in the matter of a single year, and I wonder at which point I’ll stop buying them altogether – 50 Baht? 80 Baht? Maybe even 100 Baht?
Perhaps sooner. But right now, I can still eat my favorite red bean curry once a month. Good Ol’ Days, indeed!

On a similar note, we often ask ourselves: at which point do people stop buying eggs and start keeping chickens? From around 100 Baht per carton pre-pandemic, egg prices now regularly reach 145 Baht per carton (30 eggs). Will people still buy them at 200 Baht? At 300?
What price do the ubiquitous blue-green LPG bottles widely used as cooking fuel have to reach before people start using firewood instead? And what will it take for the people to realize that local sources of firewood deplete fast if you don’t replant trees at the same time?

The main aspect through which collapse makes itself felt right now is the rising cost of living we’ve been all so busily complaining about. Life slowly becomes unaffordable for everyone except the rich. The uncomfortable reality (that most people choose to ignore) is that prices will perhaps never go down again.
At which point does society admit to itself what’s really happening?

Climate activist adrienne maree brown [sic.] has sarcastically called the current era “the Golden Age of Global Warming,” when it’s balmy in November and you can hold barbecues outside in early spring – although this brief “Golden Age” might already be over.
But indeed, on some days it seems like it’s not all that bad. The sun still rises and sets, the clouds rush overhead unabatedly, and the world spins. Mountains slowly crumble and erode, rivers carve new courses, and atmospheric winds circulate the globe. Water evaporates, travels, and falls back down elsewhere. Deserts inch forwards, forests thin out and die, and lakes dry up. All those are processes that have shaped the planet over eons, and while I’m not trying to make the Deniers’ favorite point that “the climate has always changed” (which it has, of course), I do feel it’s important to put things into perspective. I’ve found that putting things into deep time relation, to look at the macro view of our situation, helps calm me down. It shows that things go exactly as they ought to go. Ecological overshoot is a glitch in the system (that is also a feature), an imbalance that usually gets corrected rather rapidly, as is currently the case with our own pitiful species.
Yes, the presently observed changes are somewhat unprecedented, but so was the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs. We merely have the privilege of getting a preliminary warning before the asteroid of our own making hits us.

In the meantime, I recently realized that I have run out of clever things to advise to people. Just a few short years ago, I was convinced that planting Food Forests on large enough scales will be able to smoothen the transition into a post-agricultural world – at least locally. After researching an earlier essay on decreasing agricultural productivity, experiencing this year’s record-shattering El Niño, witnessing the utter lack of effective responses to it, and watching parts of Maya Mountain Research Farm (an over 30-year-old permaculture project in Belize) combust in an escaped agricultural fire, I’m not so sure anymore. I have to admit that I’m not even sure if there’s still enough time left to grow enough Food Forests from scratch (at least while also having access to all the amenities the system provides to make this transition markedly easier) to make a difference. But don’t get me wrong: it is still a worthwhile thing to do, though, and – save local environmental catastrophes – probably the best option we have if you ask me, despite diminishing returns and looming uncertainties.

So instead of giving advice, I will merely recount what has kept me functioning over the past few years, fully knowing that many of those who read this will already have implemented several aspects of this approach. Because it would sound like blunt bravado or virtue-signaling if I would use the first person, allow me to nonetheless formulate those things as an imperative, a friendly suggestion:  

• Cut as many ties to the system as you possibly can.
  This might be the most important point on this list, although it is similar to many that follow. Don’t fall for their shameless lies and fabricated desires. Shorten and/or reduce the supply chains you still depend on to a bare minimum.

• Get comfortable with inconvenience.
  You will soon find that convenience is supremely overrated in contemporary society, and that a little discomfort can teach you a thing or two about life, and make you appreciate what others take for granted.

• Reduce your dependence on money.
  This obviously relates directly to the first point, and might even be the single most important way to incorporate it. Consume as little as possible. Try to gain access to land for subsistence.

• Learn an ancient skill (or two, or three…).
  Whether that means natural farming, wildtending, foraging, hunting, trapping, wood carving, carpentry, pottery, weaving, clothmaking, brewing, massaging, herbalism, midwifery, or any of the other time-tested professions we will need again in the future. Your community will thank you.

• Grow, gather and/or hunt as much of your food as possible.
  Related to all previous points. Food should be free, as it is for every other living being. If you can’t feed yourself, they’ve got you exactly where they want you. As Arnold Schroder has said, “a people become fundamentally unfree when it is no longer an option to pursue a direct means of subsistence from the world itself.”⁸

• Do things yourself, with your own hands, and without noisy machines.
  Carve a new handle for a tool, fashion a chair or a shelf, make a bow, build fires, scythe some grass, cut and split wood, carry soil and water, hand-wash your laundry, compost your waste. Do things that your ancestors have done since time immemorial, and feel your true self emerge and reconnect to the source, the Great Mother. Rediscover what actually matters.

• Create new meals with ingredients at hand, and eat them slowly and mindfully.
  Before each meal, thank the living beings that gave kin⁹ life or part of kin body. Be creative, incorporate wild and/or seasonal foods, and throw overboard rigid, old recipes. Some things will taste rather repugnant (while still being nutritious), but many others will taste amazing! Get used to the stronger taste profiles of wild foods.

• Try to find like-minded people with whom to share grief.

  We are social animals, and if we confront the crisis alone, it will destroy us. We were never meant to live lives of social isolation, and it’s killing us that we’re increasingly forced to do so. If we’re alone, we’re vulnerable, and the system knows & exploits this. Merely having someone to share all that soul-crushing uncertainty and growing desperation with can help enormously – as the European proverb goes, “a sorrow shared is a sorrow halved.”¹⁰

• Take walks through whatever non-human places you have at hand, be it a garden, a park or a close-by forest, and stop often to marvel at all their inhabitants.
  The effects of this simple exercise can be profound. Of course this is much easier when you inhabit a food jungle, but it can be done pretty much anywhere where there’s non-humans. A meadow with grasshoppers chirping, a beach with seagulls, crabs and clams (among the ubiquitous plastic), a stream with frogs croaking and tiny fish darting back and forth between the stones. See that they’re still there, holding on, fighting for survival, just as you are. Contemplate on how our faiths are connected. The moment in which my right brain hemisphere is the most active is when I observe (or interact with) other (non-human) living beings.

• Sit down in the shadow of a large tree, breathe, and feel the place.
  Feel its resilience, its strength, its capacity to heal and regenerate. It has been here long before us and will be here long after we disappeared. Envision how it changed over the aeons that shaped it into its present form, and picture the forces that will change it in coming years, decades, centuries. You’ll be there to experience it, albeit not in your current constellation of molecules and atoms.

• And, most importantly (and - my apologies - most stereotyped): Just live your life.
  Not somebody else’s expectation of it. Not the sanitized, photoshopped, glossed-over and utterly unachievable version advertised by the System.¹¹ Not the life your boss wants you to live, or your professor, or even your parents. Your life, at its most basic. With all the animalistic excitement, the pleasant surprises, unexpected twists and turns, and the misery and bitter disappointments it entails.

The Elephant Path in the forest behind our house. Countless generations of elephants have walked along this same exact route - my new favorite place to reconnect & recharge.

Time and again, I am reminded of Majorie Shostack’s remarkable book ‘Nisa: Life and Words of a !Kung woman,’ in which Nisa, while recounting her life’s story, skips over uneventful periods by saying things like “we continued to stay at that water hole, eating things, doing things, and just living.”
“Just living” (or, alternatively, “continuing to live”) is an expression the !Kung use to describe good, happy times, where nothing big happened and nobody worried much. The times when I’m most content and happy are the periods when we are, in Nisa’s words, just living. When a short stroll through the garden is enough to feed us, when there are no large projects to plan and worry about, no schedules to internalize, no dates or deadlines to remember, and when we simply do whatever needs to be done on any given day.

As Daniel Schmachtenberger pointed out in a recent interview, “most of our life should actually just be an odd appreciation of what is, and then the desire to maintain and protect it.”¹²

As these Good Ol’ Days slowly draw to a close, how about we just live? How about we focus on what’s essential, on what will always be essential, and live our tiny, insignificant lives, as good as we possibly can?
And why would anyone ever need more than that?

At the very end of the movie La Haine we encounter the aforementioned quote again, this time slightly amended:

“It’s about a society on its way down. And as it falls, it keeps telling itself: ‘So far, so good... So far, so good... So far, so good.’ But it’s not how you fall that matters – it’s how you land.”

You and me, dear reader, have long realized that we’re in free fall. During these Good Ol’ Days of Tomorrow, sometimes we might mistake free fall for weightlessness, and that’s okay. Enjoy it while it lasts. But after tumbling around for a while, we now have to try to steady ourselves and prepare for the important part:

The landing.

(More on that in upcoming posts)

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1. One of Aesop’s fables, “the tale concerns a shepherd boy who repeatedly fools villagers into thinking a wolf is attacking his town’s flock. When an actual wolf appears and the boy calls for help, the villagers believe that it is another false alarm, and the sheep are eaten by the wolf.” [from Wikipedia]

2. If we are so inclined.

3. Which always also includes “[e]ncouraging farmers to adopt technology, such as smart farming and precision farming, is essential to optimising water use and reducing water consumption in agriculture.” [Emphasis added]

4. By the way, have you seen the Presidential Debate between Biden and Trump? It’s remarkable how fast things deteriorate.

5. (before I moved to Thailand in 2014)

6. Including “soft” population control through contraceptive or abortifacient herbal medicines or other traditional techniques (such as coitus interruptus and the rythm method); as opposed to “hard” population control through infanticide, warfare and genocide.

7. Maybe this process is not so different from the process of confronting ones own mortality in the face of mortal danger?

8. Full Quote:

"A people become fundamentally unfree when it is no longer an option to pursue a direct means of subsistence from the world itself. When instead the entire world is already someone else's property, and the only plausible means of survival are to negotiate, in some fashion or another, with those who have already claimed everything before one is even born; to work for them, or beg from them, or become one of them."
- Arnold Schroder, Fight Like An Animal (Episode #48 - 'What We Sang in the Mountains to Greet the Gentle Rain pt. 1')

9. Robin Wall Kimmerer’s terminology, in an effort to introduce pronouns for non-humans that don’t objectify them. ‘Ki’ (singular) is used for other animals, plants, even places that are alive, ‘kin’ is its plural. In the Thai language, the switch to a less anthropocentric language is much less awkward, since you can simply use the existing non-gendered pronoun ‘เขา’ (kăo, singular/plural) for other animals and plants without sounding like a creep.

10. Original German: “Geteiltes Leid ist halbes Leid.” A common Western European proverb, the full version is “A shared joy is a double joy; a shared sorrow is half a sorrow.”

11. And definitely not “YOLO,” which is in most cases just advertising consumerism and instant rewards.

12. He continues to explain why “progress” isn’t even a desirable goal to begin with:

“In a healthy life, progress is not as important. It’s not as central because if life is fulfilling now, if life is a gift now, I’m not exclusively focused on making it better in the future. And I’m not even focused on changing it, as much as I am maintaining and appreciating it.”